Storekeeper
A 14,000+ LOC document-processing pipeline, sole-authored in six days at a testing discipline most month-long builds never reach: 93 commits, 42 test files.
A recurring class of compliance-heavy paperwork: large document sets arriving as PDFs, XML, and archives, needing structured intake, extraction, and reassembly into correctly formed output packages. By hand, that work is slow, clerical, and error-prone in exactly the places errors cost the most. The interesting question was tempo: whether a working, tested pipeline could be stood up inside a single week, or whether tooling like this has to be scheduled as a month-long project and therefore never gets built at all.
The move was to refuse the velocity-versus-discipline tradeoff instead of picking a side of it. Directed AI-assisted development at implementation tempo: 93 commits across six days, with the test suite growing alongside the pipeline rather than promised for later, because a parser without tests is a guess with a progress bar. Deterministic code owns everything parseable (PDF structure, XML fields, archive packaging); the language-model step is reserved for what parsing cannot decide. Same accountable-owner pattern as the workbench: architecture, scope, and verification directed by the author, at one-tenth the calendar.
A Node.js document pipeline: pdf-lib and unpdf for PDF reading and writing, fast-xml-parser for structured fields, jszip for archive packaging, the Anthropic SDK wired in for the steps that need language understanding rather than parsing. 42 test files pinning intake, extraction, and assembly behavior. 14,000+ LOC, 93 commits, built July 2026, sole author.
Without it, document assembly as manual clerical work, re-done from scratch every time and audited by hope. With it, a built and tested pipeline standing ready, produced inside one calendar week. Stated at its honest stage: built and validated, not an operated service; the uptime story belongs to the workbench, the tempo story belongs here.
The deadline was a week. The tests came anyway.